Firms or entities that own or operate physical stores, which allow for onsite consumer shopping, such as Wal-Mart, have encountered significant competition from online, virtual stores such as Amazon. Physical store owners or operators have responded to the threat of virtual stores with their own versions of online, virtual store websites. However, such direct competition has so far achieved a limited amount of success relative to popular online stores such as Amazon.
New competition from virtual stores has not only impacted the market share and sales of physical store owners or operators, but has also disrupted advertising firms that deliver advertisements to consumers via print, electronic, or other media outlets. In addition, conventional advertising firms do not have direct access to consumer data that can be used to indicate specific consumers' needs and preferences and that would otherwise allow the advertising firms to better target the needs and preferences of the specific consumers.
In addition, today's physical stores rely on time-intensive manual checkout procedures that require store clerks to individually handle products, which can include identifying a product's Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode, scanning that UPC into a traditional point-of-sale system, and otherwise finalizing a purchase transaction for the consumer. While new technologies exist that can eliminate the need for a UPC scanner, such newer technologies still require manual checkout that rely on time-consuming store clerks and checkout lines that can detract from the overall onsite consumer shopping experience.